when they stop trying to blow up little kids and women, or kidnapping them to shake down farmers to blow up people for them. And it's not just Afghans. See Somalia, the Sahel, Yemen, Oman, Phillipines, etc. PS: The VAST majority don't want us to leave. But the ANSF are coming along pretty well.
The vast majority of Americans want you to leave. If the vast majority of Afghans don't want you to leave, why has it taken you 11 years to only stalemate an opponent with no Army, Air Force, Navy, or neighboring nation allied governments supplying them (as the Viet Cong had through the Ho Chi Minh Trail)? If you want them to stop rebelling against the American puppet government, you could always try leaving. Brian, I realize that you are dedicated and aren't going to change. Also that your superiors probably are not crazy about their guys debating antiwar people, with possible morale loss. So I'll stop and you have the last word.
I understand your antiwar dedication and that you're not going to change. My on this board is (and always has been) to attempt to educate or to show a side that doesn't always get seen. I'm by no means a Vietnam War expert (to accept or to refute your HCM Trail analogy), but it's fallacy to think that "no neighboring governments (are) supplying them." A vast majority of the insurgency comes from Pakistan, Iran and other Arab states such as Saudi Arabia. One of the major goals of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (I'm on a base with Danes and Brits) is increasing (at the express request of the Afghans) the capacity for standard education in Afghanistan, so that kids aren't being schooled in radical Pakistani madrassas where Wahabbism and Insurgency are preached. The normal everyday businessman and farmer that I meet with doesn't want people planting IEDs in his field. The normal everyday businessman doesn't want to be stopped along the road and either pay an exorbitant "checkpoint bribe" to the Taliban or get his family killed. The normal everyday Afghan is trying to make a living without being caught up in insurgent attacks or explosions. And the increase of the ANSF's numbers and their capability to fight the insurgency will only help maintain that security so that, when the "combat troops" leave, the field is sown for USAID, Peace Corps, UN Development Programme, State Dept., Doctors without Borders, Red Cross/Red Crescent, etc. to continue their "normal" development work. You think this is a war and want Americans out of the war, for philosophical, moral or budgetary reasons. That's fine. You (in other posts) have consistently referred to Iraq and Afghanistan as if they are the same conflict. They're not. You look at Afghanistan like it's a 12-year war. It's not. There were ~10k US Forces in Afghanistan total during the "major Iraq years" 2001-2006, which combined with a constitutional requirement to limit the number of ANSF to less than 70k (and curtailing their training) allowed the insurgency to recruit more from other neighboring countries, to get more cash from the Gulf States, and to re-take strategic areas like Kandahar and Helmand province. That's one of the things that the Commander-in-Chief is trying to stay away from in 2014. By the end of the year the US Forces in Afghanistan are going to be about 25% of what they were in the Afghan Surge, and now that the ANSF can handle security (for the most part) on their own we're able to hand off that portion to them. But this is by no means a native insurgency--it's a power play by neighboring countries to keep Afghanistan instable and insecure in order to fulfill their own geopolitical goals. As you know from the Manning-leaked State Department cables, there are some bad people in the world and when they get into power it takes a lot to stand up to them and/or protect against them. There's a reason that there are professionals who can look strategically at things, instead of those who see a 30-second sound bite at the top of the news and spin it around to fit their worldview (whichever that may be). It's not necessarily your (or any other American's) fault--you're simply not privy to real information about this subject (for multiple reasons, with security and information classification being only the most mundane of them), and you're making decisions accordingly. I'm not saying that this part of the Global War on Terror that was just-about-unanimously started 11+ years ago has always been run correctly, or efficiently. But there is a strategy in place by the Commander-in-Chief to continue supporting our GIRoA allies against the (for the vast majority) outsider-run insurgency they're facing, and to attempt to short-circuit that because of something that NBC, Fox News or Jon Stewart says in a 30-second blurb is irresponsible.
Man. There's so much nonsense in that, that it's tempting to rebut it. But it would be an hour wasted, and I said you'd have the last word. I'm glad I said that--it saves me an hour.
Not sure what your definition of the "the last word" is, but you saying his last word is nonsense sounds a lot like you getting in the last word.
I assume you're a vegan, then? Also, if you don't know why hunting allowed, and how it impacts crops and other essentials, such as range land for livestock, then that's on you. I don't hunt either, but unless you never eat any meat or any fish, you're nothing but a hypocrite by taking your stance.
